McLaren may have just endured one of its worst Formula One seasons in its 50-year history but the company enjoyed a notable triumph when Lizzy Yarnold laid waste to her opposition to take skeleton gold on Friday.

Yarnold’s sled, named ‘Mervyn’ after a City benefactor, was designed and manufactured by the motorsport giant’s sub-division, McLaren Applied Technologies – just the latest Olympic success for the company after its involvement in cycling, rowing, sailing and canoeing helped deliver 30 medals at the London 2012 Games, 15 of them gold.

It was also a second successive gold medal for design engineers Rachel Blackburn and James Roche, who were the brains behind Amy Williams’s sled, ‘Arthur’, when she slid to victory in Vancouver four years ago.

Blackburn and Roche were then PhD students at Southampton University but since 2010 have been working for McLaren at the company’s headquarters in Woking, Surrey, refining their design ideas using the company’s cutting-edge testing facilities and manufacturing expertise. The designs sleds are branded ‘Blackroc’ – a combination of their surnames.

One of the key innovations has been to use computer simulation to design a sled that can be adapted to suit different tracks by capturing track data using electronic sensors fitted to the sled. McLaren uses similar technology for its F1 cars, with a moving “chassis rig” simulating the demands placed on the car’s suspension by different circuits.

“We have taken a rigorous scientific look at sled design,” said Roche, who is also Yarnold’s boyfriend when he is not working on ways to find extra hundredths of a second in sliding speed.

“We fitted a range of sensors to various sleds, analysed a lot of data to build an effective computer model and only then did we really get a picture of what was working and what could be improved.

“One improvement that we identified was the potential to adapt sleds to suit individual athletes and configure them to suit particular tracks.

"That has always been our approach in Formula One, to consider every detail and make even small changes if they make the car better suited to the driver and the circuit. We have been able to bring the same refinement to skeleton bob for the first time.

“As well as looking at design, we brought some of our F1 manufacturing expertise to help improve how the sleds are produced.

"In F1 we manufacture a new part for the car roughly every 17 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is a lot of parts over a season, and as a result we have become pretty good at making high-quality components that don’t fail. We have applied that know-how working with both the skeleton bob and bobsleigh teams.”

McLaren has been working with British Skeleton since signing a ‘value-in-kind’ deal signed with UK Sport in 2010, and in the past year it has also been focused on the design and manufacture of a new four-man bobsleigh.

Unfortunately, McLaren’s input into bobsleigh has come a little late for the Sochi Games. With UK Sport funding only secured last year on the back of Britain’s fifth-place in the four-man competition at the World Championships in St Moritz, the McLaren sled was completed just a few months ago and early teething problems mean the GB squad have elected to use their old sled in Sochi, with a few McLaren modifications and tweaks here and there. A McLaren engineer has also been seconded to the team.

After the Games, British Bobsleigh will be working closely with McLaren to iron out the problems and produce a sled that can be the envy of the world. And with F1 rivals Ferrari now designing sleds for the Italian Olympic team, bobsleigh is poised to move into a whole new, hi-tech era.

Team Yarnold

ANDI SCHMID, HEAD COACH Won a world title and two World Cups for Austria as an athlete before joining British Skeleton as a coach in 2001.

DANNY HOLDCROFT, START COACH The only dedicated push-start coach in world skeleton and also a strength and condition expert .

MARK WOOD, ICE COACH Four-time national champion as an athlete. Taught Yarnold how to be a skeleton slider .